Team Quitter ~ View topic

Someone asked me what the role of mesmers in GvG where and what aspects to focus on and there was a thread on Guru (GvG section) asking pretty much the same thing.

Seeing as how I had some free time at uni today and I was really bored I decided to write a little something about this.

Post ended up being longer than I intended, oh well.

First off I want to make clear that any guide regarding competitive play of a certain profession isn’t set in stone, as the best way to play a certain character (especially a midliner such as mesmers and ranger) depends largely on the team build and a guild’s general playstyle as well as on other midliners that might have slightly overlapping roles (e.g. mesmer and ranger interrupts)

However this does not mean that there aren’t any basic ‘guidelines’ or key objectives you should focus on, I will try to elaborate on this further in a bit.

Basics:

It is of vital importance that a mesmer has good ping and reactions, he should be able to interrupt .75s cast times without much effort and with fairly high consistency, as well as know recharges/cast times/cast animations of important spells (everyone should really know this but it’s especially important to mesmers and rangers).

Also a very important part of playing Mesmer is battlefield awareness, mainly regarding positioning. As it is very common for mesmers to carry a hard res they will often be a primary spike target. Because of this you always need to pay attention to the battle field, so you can instantly spot it when a warrior comes running for you and take measures accordingly (e.g. pre-kite, swap to shield set, move into a ward if you weren’t already in it) This is a little less important for Me/E with melee wards as they are a somewhat less attractive target since they will be in a ward most of the time and can more easily use this to protect themselves if they need to push forward to shut something down.

Build specific roles:

Gimmick builds aside there’s 3 ‘dominant’ party builds in the metagame atm:

Standard ‘euro balanced’, 2 Warriors (usually with shock) Cripshot Ranger or Paragon, Dom Mesmer, Bsurge Ele, 2 Monks, Rit or Monk runner.

'DFesque physical pressure’, 2 Warriors (1 with hard res 1 with shock or rend touch) Cripshot Ranger, Paragon/Mesmer, Mesmer/Ele with ward, 2 Monks, Monk or Rit runner.

‘Vz esque condition pressure’ 2 Warriors (1 sword 1 axe, usually both have shock), Magebane Ranger with screaming/deb shot, Water ele with ward and death pact, Surge Mesmer (with or without flesh), 2 monks, Rit runner (sometimes a monk)

These builds differ quite a bit in how they are executed, the first build pretty much requires clear spikes to get any kills in 8v8 (or 7v7) combat, whereas the other 2 can outpressure a team and use spikes to finish off low targets when necessary.

A Mesmer's role in spikish builds:

As a Mesmer you can’t really do much on your own, you rely on other people to cast spells to accomplish anything, a diversion is useless if you don’t give someone an incentive to cast through it (be it by pressure or by spike) and interrupts are useless if no one is casting for obvious reasons. Keeping this in mind, in standard euro balanced your primary objectives will be to time diversions (on defensive characters like monks/bsurge eles) with spikes as well as using enchantment removal and surge/burn on the spike target and in between spikes you work together with the ranger to get down the static defense (e.g. wards/aegis/DA) whoever gets what is mainly up to preference, just communicate with your ranger and notify your team if you landed a key interrupt.

Keep in mind that good teams will use glyph of lesser energy to fake cast key spells like aegis and wards to bait interrupts and/or wait for a fast cast, if this is the case your ranger will have an easier time getting stuff down because of the recharge and energy cost of his interrupts plus the fact that teams tend to pay less attention to ranger interrupts than Mesmer ones.

Key skills to divert in a spikish build would be: BSurge, Spirit Bond, Shield of Deflection and to a lesser extent Prot Spirit, Infuse Health (if you run into a Healer’s Boon monk, try and divert his healer’s boon or continuously bother him with enchantment removal)

Key skills to interrupt: Ward Against Melee, Defensive Anthem, Aegis (this can be dealt with by using strips.

A Mesmer's Role in a pressure based build:

If you’re playing against a build like DF’s you will have to primarily focus on shutting down monks as the only real defense they have are the monks and the ward on the Mesmer, although it’s definitely to interrupt a fast cast melee ward, especially since MoR fell out of favor and people started running less fast casting, against a good Mesmer you won’t be able to reliably interrupt it, so leave it to your ranger.

Another thing you need to pay attention to is the P/Me which usually has PReturn or PSpike/Web and he will mostly be using those on your diversions. Pay attention to the paragon when casting diversion and fake it if you have to, this will make coordinating it with spikes a lot harder but versus this builds there’s less of a need to.

Against Vz’s build again focus mainly on monks and try and PLeak skills on the water ele and divert his trident when your flagger is getting owned by it, if you know or expect to face this build, Hex Eater Vortex is a much better elite choice than Energy Surge.

If you’re playing Mesmer in a pressure build like Vz’s or DF’s you will have a much easier time timing your diversions with people casting spells because if you put out pressure people will have to cast, your focus should be on shutting down stuff that prevents you from pressuring (mainly wards, DA, Aegis), as well as PLeaking defensive characters to threaten their energy level and looking for opportunities to assist your warriors with surge/burn, basically your role in a build like this has much more freedom but at the same time requires you to play a lot more aggressive to maximize your success.

A Mesmer's Contributions to defense:

Now this was all mainly about what to focus on offensively, but can definitely also contribute defensively. An easy thing that can really help your defense, is an occasional PLeak on Diversion, coordinate it with your ranger as it’s generally better to DShot diversions.

If your team is suffering from heavy pressure and getting pushed back, you should focus on shutting down their offense to give your backline time to recover or the opportunity to retreat. Your role in this is obviously quite limited, but disrupting skills like LBolt, EBurn, ESurge, Gale etc can help your team greatly.

If you’re making a full retreat and the other team has a cripshot throw a diversion on him (since attack skills cant be cancelled Cripshot is a really easy target for diversion) or if they have a water ele throw a diversion on him or keep him selected while you retreat and interrupt his snares, the same of course applies when you’re trying to push a flag in and your flagger gets snared repeatedly.

These were basically the main things you should focus on as Mesmer, I hope this is of help to anyone, though I imagine that anyone that plays competitively already knows (most of) it.

Some tips:

If you put diversion on a monk and he’s not casting, don’t wait to see if he does, but switch to the other monk and interrupt their hex removal.

On a push pay close attention to monks getting knocked down, and don’t be afraid to time a PLeak with them getting back on their feet.

Make sure you hotkey your weapon switches and key spells like interrupts so you can quickly change sets and/or interrupt a spell.

Watch the battlefield and click on targets for interrupts, DO NOT tab through them.

Joined: 14 Sep 2006 Posts: 810 Location: Vancouver

"strip this"
"get that ward down"

That's all you needed to say because that is their current role. Ugh, I miss chiizu even more. It all went downhill after him.

Joined: 03 Nov 2006 Posts: 1630

Joined: 01 Dec 2006 Posts: 2263

nice article Mitch; while obviously people like daemon wouldn't get anything out of it, someone whose guild is just starting to get into gvg would learn a lot from it--although daemon's summary is good enough.

The Dom Mesmer's template is almost always defined by the current Monk meta, whatever that may be. Boon prots ushered-in e-denial, while Light of Deliverance promoted the current interrupt craze. Now we've gone back to a fairly defensive metagame thanks to the need for a third healing character, so the Mesmer has settled into its role as a spike-assist. It's actually quite similar to the pre-factions Mesmer that Kriegar invented.

Exceptions exist, primarily with the introduction of Spiritual Pain and Wastrel's Demise, when they became a stand-in for elementalist spike damage, but thankfully that was relatively short-lived. That buff also killed off Rangers for awhile, but that's another story.

Overall, the role of the Dom Mesmer is to find out what's getting in the way of his Warriors making things die. If he can do this well, he is successful, regardless of the skills on his bar. Coordination, timing, and field awareness are what typically set Mesmers apart. In a vacuum they are all but worthless.

Joined: 21 Nov 2006 Posts: 668 Location: New Yawk

Rangers are Midline?

Joined: 06 Apr 2007 Posts: 345

Always happy to quote myself, most especially via guru threads.

Joined: 28 Aug 2007 Posts: 917 Location: Wisconsin

Lego posted something on rawr forums that I think is very helpful for newer members.

Granted it was written Oct 1, here's the link to it since its waaaaay too fuckin long to copy paste.

http://www.guildcafe.com/GuildThread.php?do=delpost&t=15797&postid=54615&guildid=2542

Joined: 14 Nov 2007 Posts: 74

Joined: 21 Feb 2007 Posts: 1074

Cause the Warriors are there to kill the other team.

Joined: 15 Dec 2006 Posts: 842

Everyone wants to be an article overlord.

Joined: 05 Oct 2006 Posts: 201

Joined: 17 Aug 2007 Posts: 1542

nice article Mitch